POLITICIAN WATCH : A Stand-Up Woman

Margaret Chase Smith of Maine long ago secured a niche in history as the first woman to be elected both to the House, in 1940, and to the Senate, eight years later. She won an especially honored place in that institution’s annals when she rose on June 1, 1950, to denounce the destructive, demagogic behavior of her fellow Republican, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

McCarthy, elected to the Senate in 1946, had spent years casting about for an issue that would make him a national figure. He finally found one in concerns over communist subversion. Soviet-directed espionage was a fact. But McCarthy himself, for all his noise and swagger, never succeeded in exposing a single subversive in government. He and his henchmen and their imitators succeeded only in smearing dozens of federal employees.

So menacing was McCarthy’s power, so intimidating the political climate in which he thrived, that few in public life had the courage to challenge his reckless tactics. Mrs. Smith, a woman of noble and dauntless principles, was the first senator in either party to do so. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the four horsemen of calumny--fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. McCarthy was not stopped by this assault; his depredations would continue another four years, until he destroyed himself by his own excesses. Margaret Chase Smith had nonetheless sounded an essential call to conscience. For decades she served her state and her nation admirably, never more honorably than when she stood up 45 years ago to speak for political decency.